Tag: progress update

Five months and one day after I discovered Free Code Camp, I’ve completed my Front End Certificate.

It took a little longer than I had originally planned, but considering that in addition to learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript from scratch, I maintained a full time job and tried to spend (at least some) time with my family (including coaching a season of baseball), I’m pretty happy with the accomplishment.

A couple thoughts on the process….

When I discovered Free Code Camp, I rolled up my sleeves and began the front end development section with tunnel vision, focused only on completing the certificate. Along the way, my focus broadened… I began to realize that this process isn’t just about completing a certificate, but becoming a strong developer.

To that end, I searched for additional resources to supplement the Free Code Camp curriculum. I covered a lot of these resources in a previous post, but mostly it involved listening to podcasts, reading books, watching YouTube videos and practicing algorithms.

I also started this blog. If you would have told me before I started this process that I would start a blog on learning to code, I would have labeled you crazy…

I’m an introverted guy and generally keep my thoughts to myself, so expressing myself in these posts isn’t exactly second nature. I think, however, that doing so has significantly enhanced what I’m getting from this process (and hopefully helped at least a couple others in return).

I’ve also found that trying to explain the solution to an algorithm is, in many ways, much harder than writing the solution itself! I think this has certainly helped strengthen my coding skills and plan to continue working through the solutions to many of the freeCodeCamp algorithms and projects here at crookedCode.

So, if you find yourself getting frustrated with your progress in your own learning to code journey, take a step back and ask yourself what else you could be doing to broaden your learning experience.

And finally, I want to say – Learning to code is hard!

This journey has been difficult in many ways I could not have predicted at the onset. First, of course, learning a new skill (any new skill) can be difficult. Coding is certainly no exception, in fact, I’d argue just the opposite.

I feel the difficulty is often overlooked in the many articles (at least the ones I’ve read) that proclaim everyone can learn to code. Many of these articles fail to mention that it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of extremely frustrating, trying moments, especially if you’re teaching yourself.

I’m not arguing against the idea that people should learn to code… If learning to code interests you, then by all means, let nothing stand in your way. Before you start, however, make sure that it’s something you really want to do and make sure you’re prepared to commit the time and mental energy to accomplish your goal.

In addition to the difficulty inherent to learning to code, many other aspects of the journey add to the difficulty…

Time management has been a big one for me. Keeping a full time job, having a wife and two active sons and learning to code is a very full plate. Through most of baseball season, I just coded whenever I could fit it in the schedule…

It seemed like there was something going on every night and throughout the weekend, so whenever there was a break, I would try to put some work in. I’ve got to say though, that pace is unsustainable if you value your mental health and the happiness of your family.

Since baseball has finished, I have blocked off two evenings and one day on the weekend that I devote to learning to code. Everything else (at least when I’m not at my full time job) can be spent with family or catching up with stuff around the house.

If you are learning to code and have other personal commitments, I highly recommend blocking off a schedule of when you plan to work. Otherwise, you always feel like you should be working and everything else in your life takes a back seat, and suffers because of it….

Of course, there are other things like maintaining self-confidence, battling impostor syndrome, deciding what to learn, setting up a development environment, etc., etc. but this post is already longer than I had planned. Just know that if you are struggling in your journey to learn to code, you are not alone, there are plenty of us out there in the same boat.

So, if you’re still reading this, thank you and good luck on your own journey. I’ll keep posting here at crookedCode to try to make things easier for those that actually read it. As for right now, I’m off to start the back end development certificate at Free Code Camp…

I started my learn to code journey in late February, 2016, when I signed up for freeCodeCamp. So it’s been about 3 1/2 months and I figured this was as good a time as any to share my thoughts, progress, tools that I’ve found valuable, etc, etc.

First, a little background on what led me to this journey…

I’ve been doing drug discovery/pharmaceutical research for nearly 20 years. Last year, I found out that my job was moving to a different part of the country and for many reasons, not the least of which was apprehension over relocating my two sons, we decided not to make the move.

After a lot of soul searching (and driving my wife crazy), I decided to shift my career and learn to code. In fact, the real light bulb moment was reading Derek Sivers post ‘Should you learn programming? Yes.’ It’s where I discovered freeCodeCamp and everything seemed to snowball from there…

Stumbling on that Sivers post was just what I needed and I’ve since become a huge fan of his. If you haven’t read or watched anything by Derek, do yourself a favor and check out his site. He has a unique perspective on life that’s completely refreshing when compared to most of what you encounter in the world today.

Ok, enough background…

Looking back at the last 3 months, it’s hard to put into words everything I’ve gone through in learning to code. So far the journey has been fun, frustrating, time consuming, enlightening, tiring, exciting, stressful, rewarding, humbling… Basically, it’s been a roller coaster ride.

It seems like one minute I feel like I’m on top of the world and that I can do and create anything. Then the next minute I feel like a total idiot and don’t know anything. Then genius again, then an even bigger idiot than before… You get the picture.

Free Code Camp Update

For the time being, I still have a full time job (and coach my son’s baseball team) so I don’t have as much time as I’d like to devote to coding. I’ve put in a lot of late nights and weekends and, despite the two huge time commitments mentioned previously, feel like I’ve been able to make a ton of progress.

I’m nearing completion on the Front End Development Certificate at freeCodeCamp. I’ve completed all of the Algorithm Scripting Challenges and most of the Development Projects. The only projects that I have left are to finish my Tic Tac Toe game, then build a Pomodoro Clock and a Simon game. These, obviously, will take some time, but I should get them done within the next month or so. You can check out my projects on my Codepen page.

I’ve also started on the Back End Development Certificate. The first lesson was on Git, then you get right in to Node.js and Express.js. The biggest thing I’ve learned so far on the back end (in addition to reinforcing once again that I’m an idiot) is that I need to become comfortable in the command line.

Thoughts on Free Code Camp thus far..

I feel that freeCodeCamp, in providing projects with increasing levels of difficulty, provides a great path to follow in learning to code. On the other hand, I feel some of the learning modules are lacking. For instance, having gone through the git and npm learning modules at the beginning of the back end certificate, I don’t feel like I learned much and have little more understanding of how to use them now than when I started.

I don’t think, however, this is a negative for freeCodeCamp (and not sure if it was purposefully constructed this way or not). After all, what is the purpose of freeCodeCamp?? To prepare you to become an employable full stack web developer?

Part of this whole process is learning to become resourceful and knowing where and how to look for answers when you run into problems. Something at which I’ve become increasingly skilled. Is it frustrating to pause in the middle of a project to go look up how to code something? Absolutely. Over and over again? Yup… But in the end, I’ll be a much stronger programmer for it.

In addition to Free Code Camp

In a previous post, I mentioned some of the resources I’ve been using as I make my way through the front end cert at FCC. In addition to these, I’ve been broadening my knowledge of software development in general through the use of other sites, listening to podcasts and constantly searching for ways to learn (including starting a blog!!).

Having finished all 3 algorithm sections at FCC, I was looking for a way to further my algorithm solving skills. I haven’t used the site extensively yet, in fact, I’ve only worked through about 4 or 5 ‘kata’ (which is what Codewars calls their algorithm problems), but I plan on going back on a fairly regular basis to stay fresh with Javascript as I work through the backend at FCC.

After you solve a given ‘kata’ , you can see the solutions of previous users. In fact, I’m planning on writing one of my next posts on an embarrassingly long solution I wrote that others had solved in one line. Ha! Live and learn I guess…

Like I said before, I’ve also gotten in the habit of listening to podcasts on my commute to and from work.

As I said before, I’ve used a lot of the tech websites (Mozilla, Stack Overflow, W3schools, etc) to learn as I went through the Front End course. I’ve decided to try something different on the back end. I signed up to audit a Node.js course on coursera. I can’t give any feedback on how useful the course is or whether it will help with the back end cert at FCC, as I just signed up for it yesterday, but I’ll be sure to write a future post about it.

While listening to the tech podcasts mentioned above, I kept hearing, over and over, the advice to create a blog. So I did… And I’m happy I did.

I have no idea how many people this blog will reach in the end, but one of the great benefits of it has been in reinforcing everything I’ve been learning. I know one of the best ways to really learn something is to try to teach it to others, but I didn’t realize just how true this was.

Even in writing a post about the solution to a Basic Algorithm Scripting challenge, I’ve really had to solidify my knowledge of the JavaScript language and understand the methods and data types that I’ve used. So, if you want to check if you really understand something, try explaining it to someone else…

As for advice on creating the blog itself, Simple Programmer (John Sonmez) created a great, and free, blogging course that walks you through the steps of creating a blog. If you’re considering creating your own blog, I recommend signing up for his course, it’s what I used to get started.

Damn this is post is long…

On the remote chance that anyone has stumbled on this blog, and on the even more remote chance that you’re still reading, let me leave you with this..

If you’re on your own journey in learning to code, you are going to go through some rough patches and getting though those times are going to be extremely difficult. My advice is this… Don’t take the easy way out, it’ll just lead to more rough patches.

What I mean by that is if you are looking to solve problem x, or write some code to accomplish y, the easy way would be to google it, find some code that someone else has written, copy and paste it into your project and move on… This may solve your short-term problem, but will get you nowhere in the end.

I’m not saying don’t use google to solve problems or look up ways to write something in whatever language you are using at the time. I do that all the time. What I am saying is take the time to learn how the code is written, or the logic behind the algorithm and go write your own solution…